Searching for Google Realtime Search Replacements

Over the holiday weekend, Google shut off its Realtime search function – which displayed tweets and Facebook postings – after its contract with Twitter expired, leaving the field open to competitors for now.

“While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google,” Google told the blog SearchEngine Land. On its Twitter account, Google said the shutdown was temporary and that it is exploring how to include Realtime search into Google+, its new social service.

Google

Visitors to Google’s Realtime Search page were greeted with a 404 error

When Digits asked Google when the shutdown would lift, a spokesperson for Google confirmed what it told Search Engine Land.

But Twitter has not shut off other services, which still offer access to the Twitter “firehose” of tweets.

San Francisco’s Topsy.com said it has been serving real-time social web search returns since 2006 and boasts a searchable index of Twitter data that extends three years—an eternity for content that usually boasts a half-life of a couple seconds. Topsy co-founder Gary Iwatani says Topsy’s secret sauce is an algorithm that sorts out the firehose of tweets.

“The Twitter firehose is very noisy and not very useful unless you can refined the feed,” says Iwatani. “If social data is the crude oil, we are the refinery.”

Another search engine that could benefit from Google’s decision: Microsoft’s Bing. Microsoft has been posting recent tweets from the same firehose for as long as Google, since October 2009, but appears not to have had any contractual problems with Twitter. Microsoft had no comment on the recent news.

In the meantime, reaction across the blogosphere has been muted. It was a quiet death on a long, three-day weekend, that many chose not to notice.